Chapter III: Part 3

"--and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as master-mechanic in a factory....

"He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you."

"Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something I can't forget ... the dirty coward," and I swore violently, forgetting myself.

At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a case.

"Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my household." And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going off on another and more urgent call that waited him.

* * * * *

"And how's Granma been getting on?"

"--aging rapidly ... " a pause, " ... hasn't got either of the two houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't hear of 'no' ... " parenthetically, "Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's always prospered since the early days, you know."

"And what's Granma up to these days?" For she was always doing sweet, ignorant, childish, impractical things.

"--spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?"

"You'll laugh!"

"Tell me!"

"She's got a beau."

"What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!"

"Yes, we--all her children--think it's absurd. And we're all trying to advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him anyhow."

"And who is her 'fellow'"?

"--a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other ... only--only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in love, too!"

I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then--"well, Granma'll tell me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and," I added whimsically, "I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all right."

And we both laughed.

* * * * *

When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough. She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking. Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.

After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:

"Why, Granma, you don't look a day older."

"But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left." As if she had not worked hard _before_ I left ... she informed me that, giving away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while they were in her possession) she had grown tired of "being a burden to them," as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....

Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her children--who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.

At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.

"But Granma, to get married at your age?"

"I'd like to ask why not?" she answered sweetly, "I feel as young as ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him ... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll give me a good home."

"But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same."

"Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around ... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman."

"But your own children welcome you and treat you well?"

"Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a home of my own and a man of my own."

"Besides, Billy loves me so much," she continued, wistfully, "and even though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always laughing and joking."

* * * * *

"We must begin to allow for Granma," Aunt Alice told me, "she's coming into her second childhood."

* * * * *

Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero, drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.

One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:

"Do you 'mind,'" she would say, "how you used to follow Millie about when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her, as she laid them down, and make her frantic?"

"Yes," I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, "and you would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he might turn out to be a great man!'"

* * * * *

Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ... and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.

And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ... full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then slunk into his office to read....

One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.

* * * * *

"Johnnie, what are you up to?"

"--was just reading your medical books."

"Come over here," already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he motioned me to a seat.

"Sit down!"

I obeyed him in humiliated silence.

He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign "Busy" outside.

* * * * *

At last I learned about myself and about life.

* * * * *

The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.

* * * * *

"And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?"

"Not a single word ... never."

"But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?"

"How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?"

"It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow."

"I was his son, you see!"

* * * * *

Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best there was....

* * * * *

"By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?"

"Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was almost a year ago--she was wilder than ever."

"How do you mean, Anders?"

"Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and join them."

"I tell you what," I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention, which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, "I've never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in love with Phoebe."

Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in my face made him believe me....

"Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last time I saw her."

"I'm going," I continued "(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and _get_ Phoebe." And eagerly and naively we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....

* * * * *

After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and, growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good of my health.

* * * * *

I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and her household.

For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as usual.

"I hate cities," was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.

Aunt Rachel caught him at it.

"Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat."

"'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded."

The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave me a quiet smile.

"Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!"

This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held it in his hands.

The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona--who had been off studying to be nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a good living both for themselves and the two old folks....

I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that, the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to "some swells," in that city.

* * * * *

"Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns," ejaculated Uncle Josh, breaking out of a long, meditative silence, "you kain't keep no dogs there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow ... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin."

* * * * *

Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham--there's nothing, being cooked, smells better....

Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt Rachel had informed me.

Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness that I was moved by it deeply.

"Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious," said Uncle Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in relays. Paul replied nothing.

"Come on, folks," put in Rachel, "supper's ready ... draw your chairs up to the table."

We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a silent, sorrowful man....

* * * * *

"You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie," announced Rachel, when it came bedtime.

Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the room when I got there.

"Paul, where's the light?"

"--put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think," answered a deep, sepulchral voice.

"Whatever _is_ the matter with you, Paul?"

"Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?"

"No!"

Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and talked with him.

"Ain't you heered how I been married?" he began.

"So that's it, is it?" I anticipated prematurely, "and you weren't happy ... and she went off and left you!"

"Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's dead!"

And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, "why, I never knew you got married!" twice.

"Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world--such a little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my armpits."

There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow, drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her."

At last I ventured, "and how--how did she come to die?"

"--baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl ... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said...."

"I killed her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth of it."

Another long silence.

The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney, was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the floor....

"But the baby?--it lived?"

"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone, too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."

"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer huntin' or fishin' or anything."

* * * * *

The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.

"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready--but he won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."

* * * * *

As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.

"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.

"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."

"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a picture ... Phoebe's picture....

A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run along the wind....

An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.

Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.

"Why, she's--she's beautiful!"

"Yes--got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."

"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all. An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more sot and stubborner....

"--guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even--I used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'

"When she took to runnin' out at nights," my great-aunt continued, in a low voice, "yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin', and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ... an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things--an' then--" with a breaking voice, "an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an' sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'

"It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an' whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a couple.

"It drove Josh nigh crazy.

"One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says, 'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the lickin' of her life.'

"'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might do some good.'"

"'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's a good whippin' to straighten her out.'"

"O Aunt Rachel," I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....

You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege ... that might do for domesticated animals.

"Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like that when you grow to be a man...."

Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did she resume the subject.

* * * * *

Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.

He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand affectionately on my shoulder.

"I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat you.... I've learned better since."

Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave him.

"That's a good boy!" and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost made me cry out with the pain of it.

* * * * *

"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt Rachel told me some, but--"

"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ... that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh postmark....

"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand. The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:

"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."

"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"

* * * * *

Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession, the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in kimonos.

"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window. "Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go to church this morning...."

Jenny had thought _that_ was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....

Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.

When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....

She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....

She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth. And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.

Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name--loud.... "Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole house up. And the madame had shouted:

"Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin' killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"

"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she would."

* * * * *

The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:

Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed, sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay. Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him through the heart with.

But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.

The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.

"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.

"Yep!"

"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"

"No!--got up to take a drink of water."

"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."

"I did. I bumped my head into the door."

* * * * *

I visited Aunt Millie last.

I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.

Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.

Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being adored in turn by them.

It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters, baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking, talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....

Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_....

Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me, with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....

* * * * *

But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that, from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me, before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special student at the Keeley Heights High School.

The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising the world.

I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced, modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great books as I did.

Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....

Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's _Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests, little towns on river-bends.

A tramp or sailor--which?

First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and back again?

Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett and Fielding?

It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.

Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon....

I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.

Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.

* * * * *

South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts dizzy things to look up at.

I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side. First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft. And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft. I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.

"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.

"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then, "what do ye want?"

"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"

He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.

"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin, whistling.

The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.

Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.

I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young, straight-seeing, blue eyes.

When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley and reached me a stool to sit on.

"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night. You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his bunk and eaten his breakfast."

The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a pail of potatoes....

Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ... "and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."

He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world, that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes. He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.

It was a German ship--the _Valkyrie_. But the cook spoke excellent English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all but one or two of the crew.

Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.

* * * * *

"There's the captain now!"

A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck, looking down over the dock.

I started aft.

"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir' to him frequently."

* * * * *

"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told me the captain's name).

"Yes. What do you want?"

"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."

"Are you of German descent?"

"No, sir."

"What nationality are you, then?"

"American, sir."

"That means nothing, what were your people?"

"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my father's."

"What a mixture!"

He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.

"Do you think you could use me, sir?"

He swung on me abruptly.

"In what capacity?"

"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if necessary."

He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.

"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ... but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning till nine or ten at night?"

"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"

"--sure you haven't run away from home?"

"No-no, sir!"

"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good enough?"

I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of sea-life, travel, and adventure.

"You talk just like one of our German poets."

"I _am_ a poet," I ventured further.

The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.

"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before the mast."

* * * * *

I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived in a flat in the Bronx.

He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he came home from work, that evening....

I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied. But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....

Then he began laughing at me.

"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you make up ... I suppose this is one of them."

"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."

* * * * *

"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But you can't be all balloon and no ballast."

They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she had run a dressmaking establishment.

Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for me.

"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."

* * * * *

My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess ... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge, under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.

"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a pot, with a big wooden ladle.

"Fine! but when are we sailing?"

"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."

"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.

"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."

* * * * *

Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a spirit.

"Well, here he is, as big as life!"

"Hello, Pop!"

I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.

"You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a chicken farm all hollow, too...."

He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There were gulls glinting about in the sun.

"Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in the joints ..." he trailed off wistfully.

"We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie."

I looked at him. "No, we haven't."

"I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a while?"

"The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy."

My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....

"--you need a little outfitting," explained my father, as we walked along the dock to the street....

"I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I came over."

"But, Father...."

"You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge--"

"But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge."

"--found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a little shopping."

I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....

* * * * *

We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.

"Now I must be going," he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten dollar bill in my hand.

"--to give the boys a treat with," he explained ... "there's nothing like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and here," he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... "put these in your pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason."

"No, Father," I replied, seriously and unhumorously, "I can't keep them."

"I'd like to know why not?"

"I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the Masons."

He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.

"That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere."

When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.

* * * * *

After dusk, the crew poured _en masse_ to the nearest waterfront saloon with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.

* * * * *

"His old man has lots of money."

* * * * *

Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.

The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me. He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the foreward hatch....

"I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow," I remarked.

"--we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet."

"--thought we had the full number?"

"We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital."

"But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?"

"The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to be."

* * * * *

But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea. Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both, that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his feet.

They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.

Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft as if it was all in the day's work.

The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were piled, just forward of the galley.

* * * * *

In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.

We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side. The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.

By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....

* * * * *

He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they pulled away.

* * * * *

This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic, and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine, blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....

The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.

The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of insubstantial cloud than solid land.

My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months' sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.

"What's wrong, Johann," asked the captain, "are you sea-sick already?" He had noticed my expression as he walked by.

"No, sir!"

"If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port."

* * * * *

There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the rampage again. He came racing aft. "I must speak with the captain."

There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him and went headlong.

The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... "that fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble," he prophesied.

Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck, while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed from the waist down.

The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The captain was in good humour.

"Bring him up here."

The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a sailor, yet subtly defiant.

The captain began to talk in German.

"I don't speak German," responded the sailor stubbornly.

Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.

This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began in French....

"I don't speak French ..." again objected the sailor, still in English.

"Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the cabin ..." to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, "Come on, Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's articles."

They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain, the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss anything.

"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the _Valkyrie_ reached Sydney....

"Now sign," commanded the mate, "I never heard of a man in your fix ever being treated so good before."

"But I won't sign."

"Damme, but you will," returned Miller, the first mate, who, though German, spoke English in real English fashion--a result, he later told me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....

"Take hold of him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe, sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.

They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....

Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.

"Very well, where shall I sign?"

"Da," pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into German.

But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....

_Whang!_ Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big, open right hand on the left side of his face.... _Whish!_ Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other cheek!

The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.

"Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill me."

"Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No, wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of that, my man, since you must speak English--will make you change your mind."

He was tied, with his hands behind him.

The captain paced up and down beside him.

Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the "old man" ... first in English.

"I don't understand," replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he can bully.

After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured "kid" of thirty.

Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian, French....

The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face kindled into a grin.

"What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!" He gave me an affectionate, rough pull of the ear.

"Polishing the brass, sir!"

"And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem about it?"

His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other--and to me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain--that Franz was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!

* * * * *

Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs ... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about, spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....

The sailors called me "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.

* * * * *

"Look here, you Yankee rascal," said the captain, when I told him I never drank ... "I think it would do you good if you got a little smear of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face ... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.

"In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation."

* * * * *

If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room there was the space where provisions were kept--together with kegs of kuemmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....

And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker--the object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.

As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.

Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of subdued and happy reminiscence.

* * * * *